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Cynthia Cruz

Cynthia Cruz is the author of eight collections of poems: Back to the Woods (Four Way Books, 2023); Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books, 2022), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020); Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018); How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016); Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014); The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012); and Ruin (Alice James Books, 2006). She is also the author of the novel Steady Diet of Nothing (Four Way Books, 2023), of Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays examining the concept of silence as a form of resistance (Book*hug, 2019), and of The Melancholia of Class, an exploration of melancholia and the working class (Repeater Books, 2021). Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell and of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School, where her research focuses on Hegel and madness.

Poetry

Winter 2024

California

By Cynthia Cruz

The empress of silver and drunken Yellow bells. Back home In California, In my home Where I am Not. The milk And stars stuck In the black crown. And the […]

Poetry

Winter 2013

The Flooding Subject

By Cynthia Cruz

All night the foxes Creep out from the river, Their mouths bearded in silver Streams. Silent children, secret Carriers of the invisible Kingdom. They are not my Sisters. They share […]

Poetry

Winter 2013

Weltschmerz

By Cynthia Cruz

Inside the warm, white hive of your childhood, It is freezing black ice and shattering. And though you bolt The great red door shut, It enters this world Without warning. […]

Poetry

Winter 2013

The Billowing

By Cynthia Cruz

God is taking me now Into his blond forest of music. If I follow, I will vanish. A shiny black hearse Appears at the red door Of my childhood. In […]

Poetry

Spring 2010

Heimway

By Cynthia Cruz

What did you expect Death to look like. Grief, beginning now to scum The glacial rooms in my brain. The sadness Of children’s wards, or Soldiers’ homes. Endstate. What to […]

Poetry

Spring 2010

New York State (2)

By Cynthia Cruz

Pharmacetica Fantastica, wild What the mind will do When memory’s delicate template Has been removed. Substandard state Hospital corridors, liquid like Rubber cement inhaled By children. Sweet Sister of the […]

Poetry

Spring 2010

The Going Home Song

By Cynthia Cruz

I’m going home Broken. To my trailer parked In the car lot, Covered in father’s dust. What you call reparation, I call animal. The American dream Is piss-stained, anyway. I’ve […]

Poetry

Spring 2010

Poetry

By Cynthia Cruz

And again the deadening song, Childhood’s white-noise machine, Toxic little lullaby— And, no, I will not Be destroyed. Place the bandage and still I can see What I have been […]

Poetry

Spring 2010

New York State (3)

By Cynthia Cruz

Beautiful and sad Sarah, girl Ruler of the underworld. Strange Saint of the otherworldly low Weight. In mint panties and dreamed Halo, waiting in the Arctic Hallway for morning weigh-in […]

Cynthia Cruz

Cynthia Cruz is the author of Ruin, published in 2006 by Alice James Books, and The Glimmering Room, published by Four Way Books in fall of 2012. Her work has […]